Rose Wilder Lane Takes Another Bow

Rose Wilder Lane fans should not miss Susan Wittig Albert’s new book, A Wilder Rose (Persevero Press, 2013). The book is written as a novel but is really novelized biography. It focuses on Lane’s life in the 1930s, when she went to live with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and rewrote her mother’s manuscripts as the Little House books.

I didn’t grow up with those books and have read only the first one. I have read William Holtz’s biography, The Ghost in the Little House, (University of Missouri Press, 1993; see Liberty, Mar. 1992, p. 51), which explained how Rose transformed her mother’s oral-tradition stories into commercially valuable fiction. I can’t vouch for everything in Albert’s new book, but the Rose she presents — and this is written in the first person — sounds very much like Rose’s voice.

Albert has a chapter on Rose’s brief romance with Garet Garrett, a writer I know very well. I can vouch for the fact that the Garrett in A Wilder Rose sounds like him. Some of his statements in the book are right out of his letters to Rose.

Albert’s novel is mostly about relationships: between Rose and her mother, between Rose and her seven-year companion, Helen Boylston, between Rose and a boy she took under her wing, John Turner, between Rose and Garet, and most of all, between Rose and her writing.

The later Rose became an enemy of the state. She did this by not signing up for Social Security and not making a lot of money the state could tax.

Rose wrote for money. Despite her pinched upbringing, or maybe because of it, she was a spender, not a saver. When she had money she went on trips and enjoyed herself. She paid for the education of John Turner, and of Rexh Mehta, a boy she had known in Albania. She built her mother a stone house and brought electricity to their hardscrabble farm. The rewriting of her mother’s unpublishable drafts was partly motivated by a desire for her mother to have money so that Rose would not feel obligated to give her so much of it.

The central event of A Wilder Rose is mother and daughter agreeing, after struggle and face-saving, that Rose would rewrite the Little House manuscripts without credit or disclosure. Another theme is Rose’s incessant desire to shake free of the need to earn “cash, cash, cash,” and write about the ideas she cared about, all the while she was spending money on the people she cared about.

At the end of the 1930s Rose Wilder Lane did shake free of financial obligations and write what she cared about. Her 1943 polemic, The Discovery of Freedom, has made her a historical figure for libertarians. It is not, however, an achievement that much interests biographers, who are attracted much more to the story of the unsung ghostwriter of the famous Little House books.

The later Rose became an enemy of the state. She did this by not signing up for Social Security and not making a lot of money the state could tax. She no longer wrote novels or thousand-dollar stories for the Saturday Evening Post. She did write some things, but there was less of a market for them and her output declined. She was no longer famous.

Comments

Jeanette Larson

I also did not read the Little House books as a child so knew very little about Rose or Laura. Like you, though, I found the voice in Albert's book to be so vivid. The focus on Rose and her writing worked for me because, as a children's librarian, Laura is an icon of children's literature. She also serves as inspiration for writers who start their careers later in life.

In addition to really getting the voice right, Albert meticulously researched the facts, knowing that some of what she said would outrage Laura-philes. That research is documented in the companion guide, A Reader’s Guide to A Wilder Rose: The Facts Behind the Fiction.

As a librarian, reader, and an author, I was also fascinated by the relationships Rose had with other authors of the time. Imagine hanging out with Upton Sinclair!

I very much appreciate your comments on A Wilder Rose. If I was successful in recreating Garet Garrett, it's due to your important biography, Unsanctioned Voice and your collection, Salvos Against the New Deal. Thank you.